Evil & Suffering

02/12/2018

12 Reasons You Should Think Deeply About Human Evil

by Alisa Childers

Welcome to the most depressing blog post ever....or is it the most hopeful? I'll let you decide. Could it possibly be a good thing to learn about and ponder the Nazi Holocaust, American slavery, the Nanking massacre, the Rwanda genocide, and the atrocities of ISIS? In his new book, Why Does God Allow Evil? Clay Jones argues that it is.

Jones begins by walking the reader through some of the most heinous atrocities committed in all of human history. I'll be honest—it's difficult to read. But reading about these disturbing events illuminates the fact that they are not few and far between, and for the most part, not committed by insane psychopaths. For example, he notes that genocide is mostly committed by those whom most of us would call otherwise normal and "good" people:

​It has been fascinating to me that absolutely every genocide researcher I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot of them) and absolutely every genocide victim I’ve ever read— to a person— concludes that genocide is what the average person does.

Good old regular folks—loving fathers, daughters, and sons—all of us.....are capable of genocide. (If you're thinking, "No way! Not me!" I encourage you to read the book.) Why do we need to think about the depth of human evil? Here are 12 reasons Jones gives in his book, and why thinking about them will make you a stronger Christian:

1. We've gotten the problem of evil upside-down.

We all have a tendency to see ourselves, and most people as inherently good. These messages are all over our culture....people are born good, and have to learn to do evil. However, a quick glance through human history will prove otherwise. When confronted with the unsettling reality of what humans have done throughout history, the question changes from "Why does God allow evil?" to "Why does God allow humans?" It's a powerful and game-changing question that puts the problem of evil right side up…

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

01/31/2018

Are You Guilty of This Common Apologetic Error?

by Tom Gilson

Christian apologists often respond to the Problem of Evil by pointing out that atheism has its own problem of evil. There’s a good case to be made here. The problem is, frequently I hear Christian apologists making a bad one instead. So this is a bit of internal correction I want to offer my friends on a common apologetic error

The correct version of atheistic problem of evil is one that says atheism has no standard with which to judge anything as right or wrong. I’ll explain that further in a moment. The error comes when one says, “The atheist cannot charge God with evil, because atheism provides no standard from which to charge him with wrongdoing.” I’ll come back to that, too, in another moment.

Briefly on the Naturalistic Problem of Evil

When I speak of atheism, I mean the naturalistic/materialistic version, the worldview that says nothing exists but matter and energy, interacting according to regularities we call “laws of nature.” (Some atheists say abstract objects like numbers may exist, too, but that gets complicated and it’s not necessary for these purposes.)

Now, it’s impossible for mere matter and energy to make anything morally right or morally wrong. It can only make what is, not what should be or shouldn’t be; and in fact it cannot help but make what is, for it’s driven by physical necessity (natural law). Alexander Pope said, “Whatever is, is right.” That was bad thinking on his part, but I’ll borrow it anyway. Naturalism says, “Whatever is, is.”

So naturalism has a problem of evil: There’s no way to call anything wrong or right. Not anything at all, ever. If you want to call anything evil at all — child molestation, slavery, sex trafficking, racism, opioid dealing, whatever — naturalism can only get you as far as saying you don’t prefer it. Or your culture doesn’t prefer it, or it isn’t conducive to human flourishing. Either way, it can’t get you as far as saying any of that is either right or wrong…

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

01/22/2018

Defending Your Faith 101: Sources of Evil and Suffering

by Teri Dugan

“We need to know God’s plan so that we can make sense of tsunamis, fires, cancers, strokes, rapes, tortures, and the fact that, except for the Lord’s return, the only thing that will prevent us from watching everyone we know die will be our own death. If we don’t understand that our good God can have a good purpose in allowing evil, we’ll live confused Christian lives.”

-Dr. Clay Jones, Biola University

Suffering, whether it results from natural or moral evil, is suffering nonetheless and we all experience some form of it in this life. No human is immune. Understanding sources of evil can help us explain it to those who ask, or correct those who lay blame at the feet of God. As Christians it is our duty to give an answer to those who ask about the hope that we have in Christ Jesus, always doing so with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15).

There are three major factors in identifying sources of evil:

Factor #1: The value of freewill

It would not be possible for things like love, relationship, and intimacy to exist without freewill, and it would not make sense to create beings with freewill and not allow them the possibility to misuse it. This is what happened with Adam and Eve, and from the few clues we get in Scripture, this is what happened when Satan and his angelic followers fell.

God created Adam and Eve and gave them everything. We don’t really comprehend how awesome it was for them to be in paradise, able to walk and talk with God face to face, but they chose to throw that all away in an effort to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5). This also seems to be the cause of Satan’s fall from Heaven, a desire not just to be like God, but to be God (Isaiah 14:13-14).

Sometimes people will say, “why do I have to suffer and pay the penalty for the sins of Adam and Eve, I wasn’t even there?” Actually, we were there “in Adam’s loins” and therefore present at the ‘Fall.’ Through modern science we now know that we carry the genetic material (DNA) passed down from our original parents. Since Adam and Eve are both our spiritual and physical parents (and could only reproduce after their own kind) they passed their fallen nature on to us…

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

01/16/2018

Jaws and the Meaning of Life: It's just too hard to swallow

by William M Briggs

There is a scene early on in the killer-shark movie Jaws which has marine biologist Matt Hooper explaining to Amity’s Mayor Larry Vaughn the nature of sharks. “Mr Vaughn,” says Hooper, “what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine — an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim, and eat and make little sharks. And that’s all.”

Is this explanation true? If so, then why doesn’t it also apply to ocelots? What else besides running, eating and making little ocelots does this carnivorous beastie do?

And if it works for sharks and ocelots, why not also for dandelions, cockroaches and ratbirds (pigeons)? And if for them, why not for all life? Why not for you, dear reader? After all, what else do people do except scurry about, eat and make more people?

A Bag of Bones

If life can be reduced to biology, to nothing but chemical and physical interactions — as many atheists claim — then the explanation that all life, including our own, is meaningless futile repetition must be true.

Don’t pass too quickly by “meaningless.” This is the main point. If our lives are solely biology, then our lives have no meaning. This is a stronger conclusion than you might think. For it follows that any meaning anybody ascribes to any event in life is itself meaningless. Any and all moral judgments are mere prejudice, the result of particular arrangements of chemicals operating under unbreakable physical laws.

If all moral judgments are prejudice, then everything anybody ever thinks or says is opinion. And it’s forced opinion, at that. All opinions are the result of chemicals pushing this way and that, forming unwilled patterns in brains, under the control of nobody…

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

01/10/2018

We could put it this way: The shadows prove the sunshine. There can be sunshine without shadows, but there can’t be shadows without sunshine. In other words, there can be good without evil, but there can’t be evil without good; and there can’t be objective good without God. So evil may show there’s a devil out there, but it can’t disprove God. Evil actually boomerangs back to show that God exists.— Frank Turek (from, Why Evil Disproves Atheism)

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

01/04/2018

The Bulletproof God

by Joel Furches

In the present day, it seems that national or world-wide tragedies are a monthly occurrence. The media can barely recover reeling from one calamity before another one strikes.

And the same questions are parroted again and again in each instance: Where is your God, now? How could he allow this?

To investigate this question, a thought-experiment may be helpful.

Imagine that God intervenes to prevent a school shooting. Dozens of children are prevented from dying, and their parents never realize the horror of losing a child. Instead these children reach adulthood, have children of their own, and then die some other way; perhaps because of a car accident, a heart attack or old age. Is their death any less devastating when their children have to mourn them instead of their parents? Which is more devastating, a quick death by a gunman or a slow death by decay, senility, and marginalization? Arguably all death is equally tragic. The only thing that makes the school shooting exceptional in the eyes of the media is the number of people affected and the suddenness and violence with which it occurs. If one of those children were to die at the exact same age due to, say, leukemia, the parents are still robbed of a child, but the media would hardly waste ink on the occurrence.

Clearly stopping the occasional tragedy does not fix the problem.

So go a step further. Say God were to eliminate all natural evil. There would be no more floods or tsunami, no more earthquakes or AIDS. All human beings would be granted eternal youth and vitality.

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

11/29/2017

Atheism is too simple because it explains away pain and suffering as artifacts of evolution rather than confronts them. Yet if one explains away the problem of evil, the problem of good follows along. It is all a useful fiction. The world does not need a belief system that depicts suffering as merely some sort of randomly generated survival mechanism for it makes a mockery not only of our pain but of our highest aspirations to knowledge, goodness, kindness, excellence, and love. The beauty of our Christian creed, with its dying and rising Savior, is that it is large enough to contain all of these – the good as well as the evil. It reminds us that there is a world of objective “meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness” outside the groans of this world.— Rebekah Valerius (from, The Burden of Doubt: A Cross to Bear)

Christians today are facing more challenges than ever. The Poached Egg exists to equip Christians to meet those challenges and be more confident in their faith and become more effective witnesses for Christ. If you find these articles and posts useful, please consider partnering with me in 2018 to continue this work that God has laid on my heart. As someone once said, the Gospel is free, but someone has to pay for the plumbing. You can become a monthly partner for just as little as $5 a month (that’s only $60 a year), the price of a gourmet cup of coffee. Special one time gifts are welcome and encouraged as well. Will you help?

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

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For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; instead, we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. 2 Peter 1:16